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JK Rowling is not a gender essentialist. Gender essentialism is believing girls/women must perform femininity and boys/men must perform masculinity or that anyone performing femininity is a girl/women and anyone performing masculinity is a boy/man. JK Rowling believes that sex in immutable and that performance of sex stereotypes is irrelevant to someone's actual sex.

In her own words from her eassay from 2020, "I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class."

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